Hospitality Industry
OVERVIEW

Introduction

This tutorial is designed to help you begin researching the Hospitality industry. The Hospitality industry encompasses many interrelated businesses, including restaurants, lodging establishments, casinos, private clubs, timeshares, meetings, and so on. In addition, it covers many aspects of those businesses, such as management, human resources, guest services, technology, and marketing.

This tutorial will give a broad overview on searching the hospitality industry. For more specific guidance in a particular area, see the Food, Lodging, MICE, Theme Park, and Tourism industries that are covered in separate tutorials.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in January 2009, there were 13,275,000 people employed in the hospitality and leisure industry, which includes accommodation and food services, arts, entertainment, and recreation.

There is a wide variety of information available on the Hospitality industry, from news and brief articles for practical matters to statistics and scholarly books and articles for academic research. This tutorial will help lead you to sources that provide the hospitality information you need.

Topic Selection

A good topic for an academic project is one that interests you, fulfills the parameters of the assignment, and is researchable. The following guidelines may assist you in choosing an appropriate Hospitality topic:

Try to choose a "manageable" topic that is not too broad or too narrow for the assignment.

For example, hospitality management is probably too broad of a topic for a ten-page research paper. You would quickly be overwhelmed with thousands of relevant books and articles on such a topic, which is way too many to use in a ten-page paper.

On the other hand, Darden Restaurants’ use of rewards for retaining employees is probably too narrow for such a paper. You would have difficulty finding information in trade or scholarly books and articles on such a specialized topic.

In this scenario, you might eventually refine your topic to something more manageable, such as employee retention improvement in the hospitality industry. A librarian or professor can also help you identify suitable topics in your area of interest.

Identify concept clusters associated with your topic: these are relevant main keywords and their synonyms and near-synonyms. For example, for our topic of employee retention improvement in the hospitality industry, you might identify clusters such as:

• Cluster 1: hospitality industry... hotels or restaurants
• Cluster 2: employees... personnel... workforce or workers
  
• Cluster 3: retain... retention... turnover

These keywords will be helpful when you search for information on your topic in library catalogs and article databases. As you do more research, you may add or delete keywords (or even entire clusters) from your search. Throughout the process, try to remain flexible and be willing to alter the focus of your topic as you learn more about it.